IT HANGS over the man strapped to the gurney, this faraway dreaming. His chart says: Agitated. It says other things too: pupil dilation; dime-size welts along both arms and the base of the spine; sores along the upper and lower lip; hypoxemia. You get some of that with drugs, but this isn’t drugs. Lemon dye, he mumbles to the fluorescent ceiling, emon dye lemon dye. The chart says Agitated but he looks serene, quiet the way they often are when they’re wheeled into Jackpot.
Outside, the valley towns flicker and shake in the half-light, the downward sweep of the hillside visible through the hospital window as a rough brown tongue of land, dotted with shrubs and the stubbornest marigolds. Sometimes, if the wind moves just right, you can almost mistake the small dead leaves for rain.
There are worse places to work. Most every charity hospital in the state of California has at least one Belief Mediator on staff, but at St. Peregrine the Department of Novel Disease is
